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"There Is Power In Being Out": A Three Article Approach Celebrating The Experiences Of Queer University Leaders, Andrew R. E. Lorenzana

Dissertations

Institutions of higher education were historically built to serve a wealthy, White, straight male student population and the leaders of these institutions still largely reflect these demographics. This project specifically aims to celebrate and amplify the life and career of university administrators who identify within the LGBTQ community. Mainly through the use of a portraiture methodology, this three-article study attempts to examine the ways in which LGBTQ identity and career influence one another.

Worldmaking and narrative will be used as a theoretical frame to help analyze the ways in which the telling of a queer individual’s story makes the world …

Surviving History Of Sexuality: A Feminist-Foucauldian Approach To Sexual Violence And Survival, Merritt Rehn-Debraal

Dissertations

For the most part, feminist responses to Michel Foucault’s treatment of sexual violence have been overwhelmingly negative. Though many of these negative responses are well founded, I argue that Foucault’s work on sexuality nonetheless has much to offer feminist philosophy on sexual violence and survival. One passage of great contention in Foucault’s work is his History of Sexuality discussion of Charles-Joseph Jouy, a nineteenth century farmhand accused of molesting a child. While Foucault uses this case to make important points about modern conceptions of sexuality, he does so at the cost of glossing over the child in the case, a …

Making Something Out Of Nothing: Asexuality And Narrative, Elizabeth Hanna Hanson

Dissertations

The existence of asexuality, the non-experience of sexual attraction, forces us to reconsider a great deal of received wisdom about sexuality, subjectivity, and narrative, which are all closely bound together in modernity. These discourses, whose interactions we find in distilled form in the novel, have both necessitated and facilitated asexual erasure. I read asexuality as a threatening absence or stasis jamming the economy of desire that operates between subjects or propels a narrative forward. Grounding my study of asexuality in narrative theory and queer theory, I explore narratives that confront asexuality at the level of content--its manifestations, misrecognitions, and repudiations …